Now that's what I call blogging 2019

Posted by Mark Welford, Fuse Communications Officer, Teesside University

Happy New Year – can I still say that or have we reached peak-greet when this obligatory salutation is no longer required in email, phone, or awkward fleeting corridor exchange?

This time of year is all about numbers: the 12 days of Christmas, the pounds you’ve gained (lbs) or lost (£), counting steps, units, the 31 days of Dry January, Veganuary, or the point at which you can grant yourself a run free day.

It therefore seems fitting that the Fuse blog has a countdown of its own.  Last year was a fine vintage for blog posts but you may not have had the opportunity to read all 40 of them.  To save you time we have had a look back and created a Top 5 Chart of the ‘bestsellers’.

So without further ado, here’s our chart toppers:

5. The provocatively titled Can cancer ever be a good thing? in which Fiona Menger (@slt_fi) revisits the writing of 'cancer columnist' John Diamond while working on a head-and-neck cancer research study with a focus on a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth.

Page views: 585.  Posted: 31 May 2019 

4. In What old crisp packets dig up Duika Burges Watson (@debedub) gets hands on to unpack the mystery of the humble crisp.  What is their continued value as ‘food’ and can we still enjoy them as a cultural icon without creating so much waste and damaging our health?

Page views: 640.  Posted: 22 February 2019

Still from the animation

3. Why do some women continue to smoke when they are pregnant?  Sue Jones (@Susan_E_Jones) shares research findings on overcoming barriers to implementing NICE guidance on supporting pregnant women to quit smoking.  The blog includes a short animation which was developed based on the findings.

Page views: 663.  Posted: 10 May 2019

2. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try & try again...  Suzanne Moffatt (@SuzanneMoffatt) reflects on 58 months of knock backs in her efforts to secure ‘the big grant’ because multiple failures before success is often untold and sometimes persistence pays off.

Page views: 686.  Posted: 15 February 2019

Courtesy of Children's Future Food Inquiry via twitter

1. "It’s time to act!  It’s time this country gave every child the right to food!"  Pamela Graham (@PamLGraham) begins her blog post with this powerful statement from Corey (pictured right), a 15-year-old Young Food Ambassador who sat on a stage in Westminster and bravely told an audience about her experiences of food insecurity.  With more than double the views of its nearest competitor, Young people taking a stand for their #Right2Food takes the crown as most popular blog post in 2019.

Page views: 1474.  Posted: 03 May 2019

So there you have it, the top five Fuse blog posts from 2019. Can we can do any better in 2020? If you fancy giving it a go, please find out what we are looking for and how to take part here.

P.s. perhaps we need to look more closely at what's going on in February and May!?


Image:

1.  'Now That's What I Call Music! 1989' by brett jordan via Flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0): https://www.flickr.com/photos/x1brett/45056607035/

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try and try again…

Posted by Suzanne Moffatt, Reader in Social Gerontology, Institute of Health & Society, Newcastle University

Ways to Wellness Link Workers provide support to people with
 long-term health conditions who are referred by their GP

Publishing a study protocol is always gratifying (even though it counts for nothing in the Research Excellence Framework!). Publication of this particular protocol evaluating the impact of social prescribing on health and wellbeing caused me to reflect on the 58 months that had elapsed between that initial invitation to develop an evaluation and getting the study protocol into print. Why on earth had it taken so long and what had we done in those months? Well, we weren’t twiddling our research thumbs, but we did get quite a few knock backs in our efforts to secure “the big grant”, and I thought it worth sharing with the research community as multiple failures before success is often untold.

We started with an outline bid to the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Public Health Research Programme in 2015 which was shortlisted, but not successful at the full proposal stage. Fortunately an application to the Cabinet Office was successful that same year, which enabled us to complete a qualitative study exploring the impact of social prescribing for service users and perspectives of ‘link workers’ delivering the intervention (work currently accepted for publication). In 2015 (busy year!) applications to the School for Public Health Research (SPHR) Public Health Practice Evaluation Scheme (PHPES) and School for Primary Care were both unsuccessful. But in 2016 we achieved success with a ‘cut down’ version of our SPHR PHPES application (capitalising on end of year finances, I believe) that allowed us to pilot questionnaire data collection (paper rejected and currently being prepared for re-submission). 2017 also saw us obtain a relatively small grant from Newcastle University’s Institutes for Ageing and Social Renewal, allowing us to follow up 24 out of our original qualitative sample of 30 service users, findings of which have recently been published.

Ukulele group, Throckley Community Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne

Despite our lack of success so far in obtaining the “big” grant, we had contributed a valuable body of work on the impact of social prescribing and into the bargain employed some excellent researchers – Mel Steer, Kirsty Laing and Jo Wildman. Yet, in spite of the apparently unstoppable popularity of social prescribing as a way of addressing long term health problems and tackling inequalities, a systematic review demonstrated that a robust evidence base about impact and cost effectiveness is lacking. When the 2017 NIHR Public Health Programme call for research on Community Groups and Health Promotion[1] (16/122) hit my inbox, it dawned on me that another application (our seventh in case you had lost count) fitted the bill. I felt a mixture of dread and exhilaration. Definitely the last chance saloon.

So, why was this bid successful? In essence, because it was more clearly focused on a specific condition (type 2 diabetes), our substantial body of underpinning research, the mixing of quasi-experimental and ethnographic methods and a really excellent team of researchers. So now all we have to do is deliver. But remember, if at first you don’t succeed, sometimes persistence pays off.

For more information about our evaluation of Ways to Wellness Social Prescribing, visit the project website.

Applications to the SPHR Public Health Practice Evaluation Scheme (PHPES) are now being accepted with funded projects expected to start from January 2020.


After 10 years’ success, as of 18 July 2025, this initial project by Ways to Wellness is closed following a withdrawal in funding. However, the learning from it provided the foundation upon which Ways to Wellness was able to build its varied current prototypes. Find out more about the work it continues to do at www.waystowellness.org.uk/projects



Reference:

1. This work is funded by the National Institute of Health Research, Public Health Research Programme, Community Groups and Health Promotion (grant no. 16/122/33). The research was informed by a NIHR School for Public Health Research (SPHR) funded project (project reference: SPHR-FUS-PES-WTW).

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

Starting out and getting ahead in obesity research

Guest post by Enzo Di Battista, Research Dietitian at Aneurin Bevan University Health Board

In the lead up to the UK Congress of Obesity (#UKCO2018), I attended an Early Career Research Workshop in the beautiful grounds of Newcastle University.

Dr Maria Bryant chaired the event in which we had three talks with some interactive elements.  Here I share a few reflections and tips from the workshop.

Grant application and interview success

Professor Judith Rankin kicked off with ‘Skills to enhance the success of (fellowship) interviews’. The talk was split into three main sections – completing a fellowship application, what to do prior to the interview and what to do during the interview.

On listening to Professor Rankin’s advice on completing a grant application for research, I noted ‘5 tips’:

1. Start early on the application – you should take about a year to draft, critique, draft, critique, and draft and critique (you get the idea).
2. Ensure you have a good supervisory team around you for advice and support.
3. Speak with additional experts in research methods. This might be a statistician or an experienced qualitative/mixed-methods researcher.
4. Contact senior people in the obesity field. Most are friendly people willing to take a look at draft applications, if given plenty of time to do so.
5. Liaise with your local clinical trials unit for advice (England), (Scotland), (Wales). 

Getting the application shortlisted is just the first step however, you have to convince funders of your credibility to give you the money. The post-doc fellowship interview is all about YOU, your vision for the research project (not a supervisors) and your commitment to a research career. To ensure you’re ready for interview, Judith stressed the importance of mock interviews. To demonstrate, Dr Bryant stepped up to role play with Judith and we had video interview examples.

To increase the likelihood of success at interview, a panel expects that you have: 

1. Enthusiasm for your project.
2. Designed an achievable project.
3. An understanding of the questions you are trying to address.
4. An understanding of the experimental approaches you plan to use. 

Influencing health-care policy

Dr Barbara McGowan was next to take to the floor for the second talk titled ‘Conducting research with an aim to influence health-care policy’.  She talked us through her career development, from working in the city as an analyst to becoming a medical doctor and research lead. Her story left the impression that her early work had given her an 'edge', improving her data interpretation skills and had benefited her research career path.

The main take-home for me was the clinical research Barbara was undertaking in pharmacotherapy (therapy using pharmaceutical drugs) for obesity. I summarised it in this tweet at the time:

Medications for obesity - findings of Liragultide & Semaglutide: Wt-loss of 8-12% at 1below -3 years.

Research to influence health care policy by Dr Barbara McGowan

Early Career Research Network for #UKCO2018 pic.twitter.com/KBDeFfPJ32

— Dr Enzo Di Battista (@EnzoRD_PhD) 5 September 2018

Semaglutide isn’t licenced in the UK but Barbara feels it will be in the next year or so.

Evaluating public health interventions

Upon returning from a comfort break we settled down to listen to Professor Ashley Adamson, Director of Fuse, talk about‘Evaluating public health interventions’. Ashley highlighted “The value of collaboration” and taking time to develop networks across sectors (industry, public sector, third sector, local government) to establish and maintain public health interventions.

Ashley asked us to form groups and consider how we would implement and evaluate a breakfast club initiative in primary schools. It was a useful exercise to consider what skills (e.g. project management, capacity/network building) and processes (ethics and legalities of working with school children/participant group) were needed for public health interventions and evaluation.

My favourite slide from the talk was entitled ‘An ideal evaluation’ which, as you can see from the picture below has 5 key points, with full references (BRILLIANT!).

Before closing the workshop, Maria asked for everyone’s opinions on the afternoon and what they would like from future events. On reflection, I felt that maintaining such a high calibre of speakers was key to the quality of the workshop – so that needs to be consistent. Perhaps in future, it would be interesting to hear about emerging subjects within the obesity field and to invite someone who has recently completed a PhD or Post-doc fellowship to share their personal experiences.

If you have any thoughts on what makes for an excellent Early Career Research Workshop please feel free to post a comment below and I can feed it back to the UKCO2019 organising committee. Many thanks!

Collaborating, meandering and consolidating to identify research priorities on welfare advice and health

Posted by Natalie Forster, Senior Research Assistant and Monique Lhussier, Associate Professor in Public Health and Wellbeing, Northumbria University and Fuse

As the judges of the Man Booker prize for fiction whittle down their long list and decide on the shortlist of books in the running for best novel of the year, we’ve been making a few (more research focused) lists of our own.

Setting aside our individual research plans and ambitions to focus on welfare and health

Funded by the NIHR School for Public Health Research, we are currently working collaboratively (from across Fuse, University College London, The University of Sheffield, and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) to set the future research agenda in the area of welfare advice and health. Working across this number of institutions, we have managed to set aside our individual research plans and ambitions and combine our expertise in a series of workshops to focus on the issues of welfare and health. Colleagues from the welfare advice sector have agreed to join us and are keeping the discussions grounded in the realities of practice, over the course of four workshops (this blog marks our half way point).

The first workshop saw us (tentatively at first) present our research to each other; with both our detailed topics and methodologies varying significantly, as one might expect. Deciding which research questions to pursue is a daunting task. Shortlisting questions was a delicate juggling act of managing our respective interests and expertise, while keeping practice perspective up front and centre, to ensure the usefulness of our future findings. This process also opened up fundamental discussions about the role of welfare advice in society, and how this should be studied.

One key area of debate concerns whether we should study the health impact of welfare advice, welfare itself, and/or systems of welfare provision in their broadest sense. At present, the UK boasts a welfare system that, in its complexity and inaccessibility, needs the intervention of advice services for users to access their entitlements. As researchers, should we therefore focus our attention on this hostile welfare environment, thought to perpetuate or deepen health inequalities, as opposed to advice services themselves? For example, a research emphasis on the health outcomes of advice might have been interesting but could play into wider failings to make benefits accessible if the advice-health relationship is proved any less than definitive. The group also considered whether advice services should be studied as an intervention or in terms of their function within society.

Further discussions centred around which outcomes, and particular user groups to focus on, and whether to study universal or means tested benefits, continuously swerving between the pragmatic and the theoretical, the national and the local. These fruitful meanderings were captured in a long list of possible research questions which we then worked to weigh up against agreed criteria. The result? A consolidated and (slightly!) shortened list of research questions, focused on five priority areas:

1. Are there inequalities in the impact and reach of advice services across social groups? How/ does advice delivery mode matter?
2. What are the individual and system level impacts of the de-implementation of advice services?
3. What are the impacts of changes to welfare provision on children, inter-generationally and throughout the life course? 
4. How do experiences of social welfare vary by social group, geographically and across generations? How do different identities combine to influence how social welfare is understood? 
5. What is the impact of the rise in precarious employment and low wages on advice seeking and provision?

So quite a research agenda to fulfil! Throughout the remainder of the project, we’ll be engaging with advice sector representatives and recipients of advice to hear their views on the directions research in the area should take before developing concrete plans for how we could actually carry out this research. After that it’s time to commit pen to paper and draft those grant applications!

Is it possible to have a research career without being a workaholic?

Posted by Peter van der Graaf, AskFuse Research Manager, Teesside University

This was one of the burning questions that NIHR trainees put to an esteemed panel of career advisers at their annual meeting in Leeds. Every year the National Institute for Health Research brings together their trainees at a two-day event to network, share experiences, take part in workshops and generally learn more about the largest national clinical research funder in Europe. This year’s theme: Future Training for Future Health.

With all these bright minds in the room and a dedicated session on successful fellowships and grant applications, you would think ‘top tips on surviving an interview’ and ‘what mistakes to avoid in an application’ would be on the top of their list. However, after several inspiring presentations from previous and current award holders who had climbed the academic ladder - including Fuse Director Ashley Adamson a NIHR Research Professor - participants were equally, if not more, concerned about maintaining a healthy life-work balance.


Follow the yellow brick road to academic success

While Brexit questions made a brave entrance (Q: How will Brexit affect future research? A: In the long term, not all all!), they could not knock questions about mental health and wellbeing from the top spot. When Ashley included pictures of her son in a musical-inspired animation of her academic pathway (follow the yellow-brick road!) to explain that she preferred part-time work to spend more time with her family, participants immediately asked “but how do you fit family in with an academic career?”.

New gadget SLI.DO was introduced by the NIHR at the meeting this year: participants could submit questions through a mobile app, which others could vote to be answered by the panel (Bush Tucker Trial for academics). Not having to stand up in front of an audience to say who you are, might have given some participants the confidence to ask uncomfortable questions. The honest and open stories from the presenters about their own struggles and failures in academia (“my new post oscillated between agony and despair”) might also have contributed to this confidence.


Paul McGee emphasises the importance of
 looking after your mental health in academia

Experiences of stress and concerns over mental health in academic careers were acknowledged throughout the conference in various presentations and workshops. This was perhaps most evident in the closing session by Paul McGee (aka The Sumo Guy) who emphasises the importance of looking after your mental health in academia. His four key messages (be kind to yourself; get perspective; hippo time - to wallow - is ok; and keep pushing) resonated with many participants and provoked a strong response on social media.

As public health researchers, we are familiar with these messages. In our studies, we underline the link between physical and mental health, express our deep concern over the lack of mental health services and highlight the importance of resilience training from an early age in schools. However, it appears that we are not very good at applying this evidence to our own life and work.

This was recently confirmed by a systematic review of published work on researchers' well-being featured in the Times Higher Education. The review, commissioned by the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust, found that academics face higher mental health risk than many other professions. Lack of job security, limited support from management and weight of work-related demands on time were listed as factors affecting the mental health of those who work in higher education.

Given this evidence, is it possible to have an academic career and stay healthy? Despite the questions raised at the annual event, the NIHR trainees were keen to acknowledge positive mental health messages: you can have a life and family outside academia (no need to be workaholic, although being a data geek is acceptable*); it’s ok to be different and carve your own path to develop your intellectual independence; and most of all: the key to success is self-care and not funding.

* An after-dinner presentation by @StatsJen taught us that there is a perfect correlation between eating cheese and death by entanglement in bedsheets. Will midnight cheese feasts be the next public health scare?

ESRC vision includes plans to promote bold new approaches to knowledge exchange

Posted by Mandy Cheetham

An ESRC grant writing workshop last week organised by Durham University gave us some insight into the ESRC's vision and priorities for 2015 / 2016.

In a helpful overview, Sally Johnson at Durham Research Office, summarised the plans, which include a continued focus on excellent research, quality, timeliness, value for money and potential impact, both in and outside academia. ESRC’s vision is to support ‘transformative’ research, pioneer methodological and theoretical innovation, extend partnerships in priority areas and deliver new, more effective approaches to knowledge exchange. And you don’t have to be a senior academic to submit, as fresh ideas from Early Career Researchers are encouraged. Proposals which include international collaboration are particularly welcomed. There’s more guidance available on the ESRC website.

We heard about a range of current ESRC funding opportunities, including the Transformative Research call which encourages novel developments of social science enquiry, and supports research activity that entails an element of risk (closing date 19th Feb 2015).

Information about all the ESRC funding streams is available here on the ESRC website.  If you’re not sure whether and how your plans fit, you can email remit queries to: esrcremit@esrc.ac.uk

Drawing on their experiences of ESRC grant writing Emma Flynn and Peter Tymms from Durham University shared some of their reflections on lessons learned. Thanks for their permission to share these top tips;

• Take your time, plan ahead and identify the appropriate funding stream for your proposal. 
• Identify stakeholders and possible co-applicants with interest and expertise. Engage them early on in the development of the research.
• Look at other people’s successful grant applications, if available.
• Turn up at public meetings and events organised by the funding board.
• Start small and build up towards larger grants over time. Be realistic.
• Apply for seed corn funding from your University to start to build a track record. Make step changes into new and different areas.
• Write clearly, avoid jargon. Think about content, structure, headings and format. Put yourself in the position of the reviewer.
• State clearly why you, why this research, why now, why this university?
• Seek comments from those with a track record from the relevant funder. 
• Read, re-read, revise, revise and revise again.
• Think about who to suggest as reviewers. Build in time to approach them and seek permission before you submit the application. Send them a draft outline copy of the proposal for comment.
• Learn from reviewers comments, even when (perhaps especially when) they are critical. Rejections are common and everyone gets them. Treat them as a learning experiences. Don’t take them personally, reviewers are not perfect, and keep trying.
• Accept constructive feedback in a positive spirit. Work from it. Be persistent.

There’s helpful guidance on the ESRC website too about how to write a good research grant proposal.

Good luck!